Creating your corequisite course: Who should get involved?

Building a corequisite course takes time and effort. And when it comes to building a successful coreq course, it takes a village.

Identifying leadership for the group decisions surrounding this kind of course is important, so who should become involved?

Some ideas of groups and organizations include the following:

Administration – Of course, you’ll need the help of administrative offices. Bringing together the provost, department head, Office of Institutional Support, and more will help get everyone on the same page and chart a course for success.

Advising – Getting the help and opinions of advisors will help make the advising period more fruitful for students, especially if they need remediation. If students don’t know about the corequisite offerings, they won’t be able to enroll in those courses.

Financial Aid – One of the goals of corequisite education is to provide students with an accelerated learning sequence to save them both time and money. The Financial Aid Office has great resources to utilize in the shared pursuit of providing students an affordable education.

Grants Office – Find out if there are any grants to which you can apply to help fund your corequisite initiatives!

Office of the Registrar – Scheduling coreq classes might be new to everyone at your institution, so it’s imperative to have the registrar’s help with registration and enrollment. Since there are different structures to choose from, this office’s expertise will shed light on what kind of schedule is best.

Other Academic Departments – Have departments outside of yours started using a corequisite structure? If so, learn from their experience!

Student Government and Alumni Associations – See what students have to say! What are their hopes and concerns regarding the new course? What do they need from it in order to graduate and be successful post-graduation?

Your Publisher – Keep your publisher in the loop regarding what kinds of materials and tools you’ll need for this new course structure.

As this is an ongoing conversation, we’ll continue adding ideas here on our blog. If you have recommendations regarding who should get involved with planning your corequisite course, let us know in the comments!